Ironically (or, if one wanted to push the issue, typically), Bova manages to get his science wrong, despite patting himself on the back with this:

"Me, I write science fiction, stories that attempt to show how we can change the world — for the better or for the worse. Most people don’t read science fiction because (I suspect) they’re afraid they’d have to do some thinking."

Uh, yeah...

Which reminds me: Despite having read a fairly large amount of SF in my time (and being enough in the in-crowd to call it "SF" rather than "sci-fi") I don't recall Ben Bova ever writing anything good. Indeed, I'd always assumed him to be a member of the oft mentioned 90%.

I'm not into SF, but I can smell a mutant space rat with a micro-taser and an interplanetary time machine a light-year away. I'd lay odds that fearless thinker, Bova, has never delved into the NF world of timeless reality - Truth. Truth and reality are much harder to get a grasp on than anything someone can imagine. It's an endless pit of thinking, reasoning and understanding. Such difficult thinking is required that even when God gives us a great mind like Aquinas to do much of the thinking and predigest it for us - it still requires heavy thought.

I read a lot of sf. When I was ten, and read all my brother's Asimov and Clarke out of boredom. Then I outgrew it, became a mindless non-sf reading breeder, and now waste my time reading--let's see, what was it this week?--Graham Greene and Austen.

Maybe most people don't read sf because, *pace* Sturgeon's Law, 90% of it is juvenile.

I read a couple Bova books a few years back. They weren't good. As with so many other areas of life and literature, the folks who are really good at it are not the same folks who are griping about everyone else.

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Reading

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